WinRAR Recovery Records: How to Repair Damaged Archives

What Are Recovery Records?

A recovery record is redundant data added to a RAR archive that allows WinRAR to reconstruct damaged portions. Think of it like a RAID parity block for archives. If your archive becomes partially corrupted (from a failed download, bad storage sector, or transmission error), the recovery record lets WinRAR repair it without losing any files.

Recovery records add a small overhead to the archive size (typically 1–10% of total size) but provide substantial protection. They're especially valuable for archives stored long-term or sent over unreliable networks.

Adding Recovery Records When Compressing

To add a recovery record to a new archive:

Open the Archive parameters dialog (right-click → Add to archive…)
Click the Recovery record checkbox in the General tab, or go to the Recovery tab
Set the percentage — 5% is suitable for most use cases; increase to 10% for archives stored on unreliable media
Create the archive normally

You can also add a recovery record to an existing archive via the Commands → Add recovery record menu inside WinRAR.

How Archive Repair Works

When WinRAR detects corruption during extraction, it reports a CRC error. If the archive contains a recovery record, WinRAR can often fix the damage automatically. The repair process reads the corrupted archive, identifies which blocks are damaged using the recovery record's parity data, and reconstructs the correct data.

Without a recovery record, WinRAR can sometimes still make a best-effort repair — extracting what it can and marking damaged files — but full reconstruction is impossible.

How to Repair a Damaged Archive

Right-click the damaged archive and select WinRAR → Repair archive
Choose the output folder for the repaired archive
Click OK — WinRAR scans the archive and attempts reconstruction
WinRAR saves the repaired archive as fixed_[originalname].rar
Try extracting the repaired archive

Locked Archives and Integrity Testing

You can lock an archive to prevent accidental modification. Locked archives cannot be modified and serve as immutable archives. Separately, the Test archive function (right-click → Test archive) verifies every file's CRC checksum without extracting anything. Run this periodically on important archives to catch silent corruption before you need the files.

Best Practices for Archive Integrity

Always add a 5% recovery record to archives larger than 100 MB
Use Test archive after creating any important archive to verify it's intact
For critical backups, store archives on two separate media (e.g., external drive + cloud)
Consider adding both a recovery record and locking the archive for long-term storage

Conclusion

Recovery records are one of WinRAR's most underused features. Adding just 5% overhead to an archive can be the difference between recovering your files and losing them permanently. Make it a habit to enable recovery records for any archive that matters.